MACHALA, ECUADOR
As it turned out, there were no busses that went directly from Cuenca to Zaruma so we had to sacrifice one night in sweaty Machala. The city had an incredible heat and oppressive stench that suffocated every last drop of happiness right out of your pores. It was always raining a hot slithering rain that evaporated in midfall and made the air so sickly humid that befuddled fish from the river were swimming down the street.
The cab driver took us to a hotel that he knew was safe and said to us, “once you get out of the car, you RUN to the hotel! I’ll wait to be sure you make it safely. Now RUN!” And we ran across to the only lighted door on the street shining sickly yellowgreen in the black of heavy night. There were lizards crawling in our tiny hotel room and the window that refused to shut just let the rain float on in. We left that swamp-sick town as soon as we could the next morning but the vendors were out early with their melted yogurts and musky warm melon juices yelling “Hey white people! Buy our shit!” So angry at the world they were. Later we would make up our own insults to use on robbers and mean people like “Go to Machala!” or “Your mother is from Machala!”
ZARUMA, ECUADOR
After that smoldering hell we came to this tropical paradise sitting quietly on the edge of a mountain. It was once one of the largest producers of gold in the world and was made out of winding and vertical streets and old wooden architecture. We learned quickly that the people of this little old mining town and the people of Machala were exact opposites. Everyone on the street waved to us “hola, buen día” with huge bright smiles on their faces. A woman stopped us to give us some of her cookies that she’d just freshly baked. We felt like we’d been on a journey to faraway lands and these people, greeting us with open arms, we’d known our whole lives.
The Belgians gave us the name of a good hotel so we got a room at a discount price because any friend of the Belgians is a friend of the hotel owner. We licked fig ice cream in the plaza and had a coffee on the balcony of the little café below our window, admiring the buildings and the view. The houses were grand wooden things painted many colors and carved into many shapes. Kids were kicking a ball down the street and women were watching and laughing from their verandas.
As Steffi and I walked through the city we noticed that there were signs all over the place for tourist information and interesting sites, but there were no tourists. A woman called us from the veranda of her office so we went in and sat down at her desk of maps and pamphlets. She said that she’d seen us come into town that morning. The woman gave us a map and showed us short hikes up to the best view in town, a mine tour, an old candy shop, and a museum. She gave us fliers and brochures and a beautifully printed booklet on Zaruma and all for free. In our experience, people don’t give you maps and booklets and tourist information for free. We wondered where the catch was--but catch, there came none.
We went to the closest place on the map, a museum just a zigzag and a steep descent down the street. All the lights were off; there was nobody home. We went in anyway, stepping over piles of cal from the walls. and met a man chiseling something who let us look around though it was closed for renovation. We found stacks of papers and old gramophones, fossils and sculptures. And leaving the man to his work, we went on to the old mine to take a tour.
Walking down one of the side streets on the outskirts of town, we found orchids clutching to lampposts and bromeliads growing on the sides of houses. And cotton plants, huge bushes of spectacular curling flowers, and all sorts of other green green leafy things. All those big-leafed plants and flowering shrubs you see potted in the store: somewhere in the world they are wild. At the mine, El Sexmo, waited a man every day from nine until four for any tourists, may they come. And the tour was completely free, we were very surprised to learn. Equipped with rubber boots and helmets we were led into the dark with stories of the history of the land. Water trickled and plink-plunked from the rock walls and made our path a steady stream of orange-yellow sticky mud—and we stopped for a photo-op with a mine cart and the tour was done. I bought a wooden keychain from our guide because we were his only tourist visitors that day. And a heavy rain had started while we were inside, but it was warm and puddle-wonderful so we walked through it enjoying the wetness and discovering the most marvelous of spiders, velvet-glass butterflies, and strange sexual flowers.
As evening crawled up over those bluegreen hills, we took a cab to Bocadillos Doña Cleme—a family shop of sweets started by a little grandmother who lived to be one hundred and fifteen. Do you want to know her secret? Everything she used to make her candies, she grew on her land—sugar cane, coffee, cocoa, chickens, peanuts, guanábana—all of it lush and still fertile in her acres. This was what we’d come looking for in Ecuador! This is what we had wanted to find all along. We would have come here and worked in their gardens making chocolates and guanábana sweets for beds and food. We ate spiced tamales swatting mosquitos and thinking of how, though we’d found it on our last day in Ecuador, we most definitely enjoyed the hunt.
We walked around that night through the city in a cool illuminated fog looking at the dark architecture and smelling galantes de noche—those cowboy flowers of such midnight romance aroma. And in the twilight before the sun we hopped on another bus on another road to Peru, and there the shit began.
MÁNCORA, PERÚ
I wont get into many details here but the main idea is that Ecuadorian taxis do not cross the border, and when you walk across the border and try to find a Peruvian one to take you to the immigrations office, you should never under any circumstances select a taxi that has two people in it. To make this kind of long story short, our Peruvian taxi driver lied to us and underestimated us in his attempt to charge us nearly 100 soles for a ride to a place that we didn’t ask him to take us to. There were two of them and they were large so we paid them for taking us to the immigrations office and were left on the side of the road to hitch a ride on a very crowded bus headed to Tumbes (the nearest town with busses going to Máncora. Máncora, Máncora, Máncora! We’d been talking about this Máncora as the beachiest of beaches with the sunniest skies and bluest waves. And really, it was sunny and blue and hot and thick with thieves and shape-shifters and sand vipers and other predatory monsters. These were not poisonous snakes, but slithery people trying to squeeze from you ever cent and sol they could. Yes, some were very nice, but most were villainous. Steffi and I got a room and some ceviche with banana chips, coated ourselves in sunscreen, and walked out to the shops along the beach looking for skirts and bathing suits and things (for I had left my bathing suit in a taxi on the Inca Trail in wondrous September). We found neither but went to the beach and swam again in underwear until the sun went down. We’d been wondering all day what a sunset would look like upside down so we laid ourselves out on the sloping sand and watched the bubblegum marble painted sky spread out to forever.
We were staring into the sun and just at that moment when it flattens out on the horizon like a luminous egg yolk and then disappears to make new days for other people, there was complete silence. And this was fairly odd because we were sitting by the ocean with the gulls and the waves. But for two or three seconds there were no bird cries and no crashing of the water. We looked at each other and said “chucha!”
Shortly after, a guy came up and said hello so we talked to him about how beautiful the beach was, and how many other beautiful beaches there are hidden along the coast—ones that very few people know of. He rattled off complicated names in languages we did not know so we wrote them in the sand and when the waves washed them all away, he invited us to his fire down the shore where he had paper and a pen, and with him we went. His papers were for rolling weed and he offered us some but we said no and just sat by the fire and looked at the newly visible stars.
Just then, our peaceful campfire was raided by three policemen who smelled our fingers, checked our pockets, and dug in the sand looking for something to pin on us. When they checked my pockets, they took my money and gave me back the little piece of paper I had in there thinking I wouldn’t notice the 70 soles that was missing. I called them on it and they said “no, we didn’t take any money. Maybe you dropped it in the sand.” They showed me their hands but didn’t empty their pockets. One guy reached sneakily into his pocket then dug in the sand thinking I didn’t see exactly what he was doing. Once he made my money dirty, he held it up to me and said “See! What did I tell you? You should be more careful with your money.” They found our friend’s stash and took us to prison. “Señores,” we said, “we didn’t smoke the shit! He was telling us about beaches down the coast! Look at our list!” And they said, “It don’t matter, gringos. It is illegal to talk to people who may have marijuana,” which is one of the most ridiculous things I have heard a grown man say. “And now we’re going to arrest you and send you back to your home countries,” which came in at a close second.
“You don’t want to get deported, do you? No? Well how can we resolve this issue?” They wanted my money that they’d originally taken but they didn’t want to be the ones that said the words. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to be. We went back and forth for a while until Steffi finally said, “Here, take the money.” We walked back to the room angry and defeated and had some tequila to calm our nerves.
The next morning, our friend from The Muse, Daniel, arrived and we fought the guy at the front desk for a room and even then got one with only one bed for three people and a shower that didn’t shut off. We didn’t care that much though; it was bright and airy and had a nice balcony that looked out over the dusty alleyway lined with hippies and dogs and umbrella restaurantes. While taking our things from the old room and putting them into the new one, we noticed a trail of ants on the wall in the hallway. We sat on the ground and drew our faces near and watched for several minutes as the ants carried large beetles and hornets and things down the wall to their cave between the tiles.
We wanted that afternoon to walk along the beach to the end of the world, and so we did. We walked down past the thicket of hotels and beach umbrellas to where there were no other people and found a little laguna with pelicans resting on an island and flamingos plucking crabs from the water. They were big red crabs scut-scut-scuttling across the beach and blue ones flat as crepes shuffling through the water and burying themselves to hide from the birds. Daniel found a dried seahorse and was excited as a child.
The three of us headed back from the Laguna to the beach, and while Steffi stopped to put on sunscreen, a man came up to show her his big knife. We saw this from the shore and thought he was just one of the many friends that she’d made during our two days in Máncora. Really he was a man with a big knife. When he showed it to her she thought, “why does he want to sell me a knife all the way out here?” She said, “no gracias” and he said, “gimme the bag!” She didn’t want to get stabbed that day so she gave him the bag and he just walked off with it, past the laguna and a little way into the bramble behind. We watched his friend run over and they dumped the bag out on the ground to see what they’d scored. She had 15 soles (about $5), her notebook of directions and places to go, Open Veins of Latin America (a book about social problems in Latin America) and Daniel’s watch, shirt, and seahorse. They only took the watch, the money and the book about social problems and leaving everything else, which was fine with Steffi because the bag was the most expensive thing in the whole bunch.
It seemed that in Máncora whenever we would experience something beautiful—the hush of setting sun, or the creatures of the laguna—we would be robbed shortly after. We had tequila again that night and left early the next morning, Máncora having taken a little of our faith in humanity. Waiting for the bus to come take us away, we saw the guy who had offered us pot and good beaches. He was talking to all the tourists like he knew them and we somehow realized that he was literally a tourist trap, working for the corrupt Peruvian police, trying to lure tourists into compromising positions from which they would have to buy themselves free. The policemen probably gave him a cut of the money they took from me, and from the money they took from the woman next to us who was also waiting to get the hell out of that city of thieves.
CHICLAYO, PERÚ
We waited in incredible heat at that bus station carrying our packs and drinking the water we’d bought, warm anyway from the sun. Finally the bus came filled with some of the most unbelievably rude people I’ve seen in my life. People were sitting in our seats so we found others in the back next to the onboard pisser and it smelled the entire way. Steffi is much taller than me, and when she asked the man in the seat in front of hers to put his reclined seat up for a minute so she could get her knees in, he turned around and said, “no, I can’t.” We took off watching A Beautiful Mind on tiny TV screens and a few hours down the road the bus stopped to let some more people on. Daniel went to buy a potato from the woman that was selling them at the station. He said to the driver, “I’ll be right back on, I am just buying a potato.” “Okay,” said the driver and took off as soon as Daniel got off. Steffi ran down to the driver and told him to stop because he’d left our friend at the station and the guy said “Oh, I’ll just call the company and have them take him over. Sorry about that.” There really wasn’t a company for him to call and he wouldn’t stop the bus no matter how we asked. Daniel, realizing with his potato in hand that the bus had gone, jumped into a taxi and yelled “follow that bus!” He got on while the bus was stopped at a red light and asked the driver, “is your mother from Machala?”
All three of us arrived in Chiclayo and on the first road we crossed, a taxi driver passing leaned out the window and yelled “F#@K YOU!” in English. We decided on the bus that we were not going to let that dark cloud of Máncora follow us any further so we got some cheap Chinese food in a third-floor restaurant and then found a hotel where we had wine and cigarettes and watched Where the Wild Things Are.
Daniel fell asleep five minutes after the movie started. And in the night he dreamed a dream straight out of Haruki Murakami. There was a woman shaking him and yelling at him to wake up, wake up! She shook him so hard that he fell onto the floor, and when he did he could see himself lying there as if he were a hovering camera. He woke up in the middle of the night, chain-smoked three cigarettes, and drank half a bottle of wine before he was able to fall back asleep. The next morning we hypothesized that a woman had jumped out of one of the windows in this room and died (which explained why the balcony was bolted shut and the windows were barred on the inside) and that her ghost was haunting us. We asked the woman at the front desk if there had been any deaths at the hotel and she looked at us gringos strange and said that there hadn’t.
Steffi went to see her friend Jamiro while Daniel and I went to Pimentel which was supposed to be one of the best beaches. It was, however, very blustery and the beach dipped down fast where the ocean met the land so that when waves came in, they came in huge and crashing. We swam for a little but decided that it was better to have some beers in our underwear under an umbrella. We built a sandcastle under a pier until a procession of funeral mourners came to scatter ashes and rose petals in remembrance. The sunlight and wisps of ash and fizzled wave rose and the beauty of it all made me happy to be here. Later, we met up with Jamiro and Steffi and the four of us ate pasta in La Esquina, then talked about Daniel’s ghost woman in the plaza of the muses while holding big friendly crickets in our hands.
To the desert we went the next morning by bus. El Señor de Sipán, a mighty king of the Moche, was buried there with incredible jewels, his llama, and messenger. They buried him in a great pyramid made of adobe brick and after years and years of rain and wind when the Spanish came and stole all the gold from South America, they saw here only a hill of sand. It was filled with gold and copper jewelry, figures of birdmen, and decorative vases shaped like their favorite vegetables. The Spaniards walked right on by. We saw little desert owls perched on the strange gnarly trees and it was intensely hot and dry. Not even the wind was cool. After we’d been through the museum a couple times, we hitched a ride with some miners and ate in the plaza before leaving for Trujillo.
TRUJILLO, PERÚ
We went on right through the city of Trujillo to its small beach town, Huanchaco, and got a room at the Naylamp Inn. I left my new Máncora bathing suit, my brand new leather boots, and three pairs of my favorite underwear in the taxi but, so it goes, they were only material things. We dropped our stuff in the room and went down to the gardens to lay in the hammocks and listen to the waves in the half moon light until Daniel began to snore. We three moved into the extremely hot room and slept the whole night through.
We fell in love with Huanchaco and because of this I am not certain how many days we spent there. Every place we went seemed to have the best food, and I became addicted to the large selection of pastas that the Naylamp restaurant offered. One day after dreaming about those noodles and delicious sauce, I ordered a plate of creamy pasta with mushrooms, a cup of coffee, and a jar of mango maracuyá juice for breakfast. Most days we spent on the beach where the heavy waves broke near the shore and their cold fury made it hard to swim. A woman would rent us her umbrella for 5 soles and we would curl up in the shade of it trying not to burn ourselves so badly as before. I found two sea urchins there that I tried to clean and preserve but which ended up reeking of thick, bitter death.
One night the three of us walked down to a pier constructed in the mist for tourists and fishermen. We took pictures of ourselves as phantoms. And heading back, we saw a light on in a little café called Chocolate. We got some “hot, steamy, creamy, chocolate” that melted our souls and a chocolate fondue that Steffi told us tasted like the stuff from the German chocolate shop that she worked in. They were playing Damien Rice and had a collection of crystals and fossils near the door, which meant that it was a great place for me. It was owned by a girl from Holland and her Peruvian husband, Keli and Choco. They had a collection of movies so we borrowed Requiem for a Dream and went back to the hotel after buying some dinner ingredients and wine from a corner store. Naylamp had hotel rooms as well as a little garden where people could camp or sleep in hammocks, and in this garden there was a kitchen. Daniel made pasta with cream and bacon while I tried and failed to clean my sea urchins, and when it was ready we ate dinner with wine and candle light on a table under the starry night.
Daniel told us the story of how his mother found out that his father was cheating, and how when she fought him in a restaurant the police showed up, and how she looked at them and said, “you let me finish this,” and how they let her finish her fight. After dinner we huddled close on the rooftop to watch the movie—Daniel brought his computer along—and the waves and wind proved to be too noisy, so we went into the room. He fell asleep during the opening credits but Steffi and I watched it the whole way through. I didn’t cry so much this time but we finished the bottle of wine and had to spend some time sitting on the dark beach until we felt sane enough to sleep.
We had salad and rose tea the next morning at Chocolate, and then walked up the hill to a church that looked out over the city and sea. For a while we explored the desert cemetery and ate ice cream. In the afternoon Daniel, Steffi, and I took a quick bus to back into Trujillo and walked along the streets looking in shops and admiring the rainbow architecture. As I had left my shoes in the taxi earlier, I needed to get some new ones. So we roamed the streets for shoe stores but could find none. Then all at once we found every shoe store in the city all piled on each other in an entire mall of shoes. A man named Abel sold me a pair of converse and said he would meet us later in the discotecas, which was true. But first, Gondwana (which is a reggae-pop band) happened to be having a concert that night. And after a quick dinner and some ice cream, we went and got ourselves some tickets.
We bought the cheapest ones as well as a couple of beers and were herded into a soccer field with fences in it. Apparently the price you paid for the ticket had an effect on where you got to stand. We were in the farthest section from the stage with five other people. And the other two sections in front of us had a total of three people together. It stayed just about that way for the three hours Gondwana spent being late and we spent waiting for them. Some poor guy in a wig tried to get the crowd all riled up but his asking us to shout “VERDE, AMARILLO, Y ROJO” got old after a while. Also, there were only a couple people there; even if we were shouting, he wouldn’t have been able to hear us from so far away. An opening band came out but the girl was wearing parts of a trash bag, the man couldn’t sing, the equipment didn’t work, and they only sang covers. If there had been enough people to boo them off the stage, they would have been booed off the stage.
Finally the band showed up just as we were about to leave, angry at the three hours we could have spent dancing, and they were amazing. They said “what the hell are these fences for? Take them all down!” and we flooded forth as the guards took down the partitions. We were very glad we’d not paid 100 soles to get into the front row. Daniel was a big fan but Steffi and I didn’t know who they were until they started playing. And then we realized that we’d danced to them for thousands of nights until thousands of dawns. We danced and swayed and saw Choco and Keli, for they had found a babysitter to watch their little girl. Later, we ran into Abel the shoe salesman at a club called G-Spot and danced until the sun came up and the busses started back for Huanchaco.
We stretched ourselves out on the hammocks that morning and had more pasta for breakfast. And once Chocolate opened we had some cocoa there before Daniel left on his own road to Lima. Steffi and I stayed for a couple more days. In Máncora Steffi found a ring that she absolutely loved. It had a fossil and an opal and she said she could feel a beautiful energy when she put it on. She didn’t buy it then, probably because she thought that it would just get stolen. But here we saw a decorated bus that we knew we’d seen somewhere, which turned out to belong to the jeweler that made Steffi’s magical fossil ring. Maybe they were just like us, travelling down the coast of Peru, but we took this as a sign and she bought the ring right there out of their van.
That evening I taught Steffi how to skip stones and we practiced in underwear toward a sunset so misty that the air felt liquid. As we walked past the reed boats that our little beach was famous for, while the sky turned orange-red-purple, we held up our hands like picture frames and imagined that we were back in our rooms looking at a picture, and that none of this journey had ever happened, and that when we broke those picture frames we would be magically transported to this beach right here in the world right now in eternity. We pretended and talked and walked up and down the streets like we were just meeting each other for the first time in this strange land.
We ate pasta for dinner like we ate pasta for breakfast and the windows began to rattle and shake like a spider’s web. Later, a Canadian girl asked us if we’d felt the earthquake—and we did, but thought it was only the wind. The next day we took some books from the book exchange at the hotel and lay out under an umbrella in the sand. I read a little and slept a little. It was the perfect place for that. And after lying around for most of the morning we decided that we needed to do something with ourselves so we got dressed and went back into Trujillo to take pictures with all of the many colored buildings, acting out whatever feeling that color gave us. Solemn blue and lonely white, bubbly pink, warm tomato soup like hugs, and red red passionate love. I found some stilted mimes in a corner of the plaza trying to climb into a truck and they called me over to take a picture with them.
Later, while I was taking a picture of the cool-burning moon through a streetlamp, a policeman came over to tell us that we should leave because the city was full of thieves at this hour. I thought, yes I know, there’s a thief talking to us now. We paid the policeman no mind and kept walking, but as we rounded the corner, we saw a guy put into a chokehold by one thief while the other took his backpack. They ran away before anyone could even see their faces, and it was then that we agreed to get on the bus and go home. Choco and Keli were about to have a bonfire when we arrived so we tagged along and sat around the blaze and talked about how beautiful life is until the cops came and tried to arrest us for making a fire on the beach. They stomped on our fire and insulted all of us saying, “what kind of an education did you have?” He said it was illegal on this part of the beach to have a fire, even though there was another only a couple yards away.
We’d been in Huanchaco for more days than we could count, and we needed to move on down the road. Choco and Keli told us about their friend, Cesarín, who lived on a small beach to the south and owned a restaurant with his family. They gave us his name and phone number and we made up our minds. So in the morning, before heading to this small beach, we went to the ancient Moche Temple of the Moon. The ruins of Chan Chan are the most famous in the area but apparently most of the ruins were being rebuilt. There were signs all over Huanchaco advertising all of the work that went into rebuilding Chan Chan, but the point of going to see something like that is to see the things that old hands built—the ideas and work of centuries past. Now, they would just be adobe walls. El Huaca de la Luna was less popular, less expensive, not at all rebuilt, and therefore was the more appealing choice to us.
This moon temple was smaller but its walls were covered with ornate paintings and its floors hid unknown alluring mysteries beneath. When a new desert king took the throne, he would build a temple right on top of the last, and this had seen the reigns of five kings. The outer level was destroyed by time and vicious winds and all that we could see was the fourth. There were three more levels beneath that, which would never be explored for the sake of preserving what was already found—brilliant colors and terrible dragon gods. We would never know what ancient secrets of dead kings lay beneath; we could only stare at the floor in wonder. And this was okay because what we did have was beautiful enough. It is very rare to find an ancient temple in this world, and even rarer to find a person who is satisfied without exploring it.
No comments:
Post a Comment